Poetry Kaleidoscope: Guide to Poetry

Nonsense Verse

Nonsense verse is a form of
poetry, normally
composed for humorous effect, which is intentionally and overtly
paradoxical, silly, witty, whimsical or just plain strange. It has a
long tradition, particularly in
English, being congenial to the absurdist streak in
British
humour. Some
Dadaist writings could also be considered as being nonsense verse.

Nonsense verse in this sense should be distinguished from humorous
verse or from verse that is nonsensical but intended as parody of
modernist verse, such
as the poems by the fictitious
Ern Malley. In the
latter case, the nonsense is an in-joke or
hoax, and there is an
assumption that it would be taken as meaningful, and even deep, by some readers
(whose taste is thus ridiculed).

As previously said, not all humorous verse is
nonsense. For instance
a poem like

Algy met a bear.

The bear met Algy.

The bear was bulgy.

The bulge was Algy.

is humorous but not nonsense. Whereas

The elephant is a bonnie bird.

It flits from bough to bough.

It makes its nest in a rhubarb tree

And whistles like a cow.

is classic nonsense being based on the incompatibility of word pairs such as
elephant/flit, rhubarb/tree, whistle/cow which make
grammatical sense
but semantic nonsense.

The poem ...

One fine day in the middle of the night,

Two dead boys got up to fight.

Back-to-back they faced each other,

Drew their swords and shot each other.

A deaf policeman heard the noise,

And rushed to save the two dead boys.

A paralyzed donkey walking by,

Kicked the copper in the eye,

Sent him through a rubber wall,

Into a dry ditch and drowned them all.

(If you don't believe this lie is true,

Ask the blind man -- he saw it too!)

... makes even more extreme use of word incompatibility by pairing a number
of polar opposites such as day/night, paralyzed/walking, dry/drowned, lie/true,
in conjunction with lesser incompatibilities.

Another nonsense verse goes like this:

'The deaf man heard,

the mute man say,

the blind man saw,

the crippled man walk.

Other nonsense verse makes use of nonsense words -- words without a clear
meaning or any meaning at all. Lewis Carroll and Edward Lear both made good use
of this type of nonsense in some of their verse. In these poems, the grammar and
syntax are perfectly well-formed, and each nonsense word has a clear
part of
speech. The first verse of
Lewis Carroll's
Jabberwocky
...

`Twas brillig, and the slithy toves

Did gyre and gimble in the wabe:

All mimsy were the borogoves,

And the mome raths outgrabe.

... illustrates this nonsense technique perfectly, despite
Humpty Dumpty's
later explanation of some of the unclear words within it.

Still other nonsense verse uses muddled or ambiguous grammar as well as
invented words, as in
John Lennon's "The Faulty Bagnose":

The Mungle pilgriffs far awoy

Religeorge too thee worled.

Sam fells on the waysock-side

And somforbe on a gurled,

With all her faulty bagnose!

Here, awoy fills the place of "away" in the expression "far away", but
also suggests the exclamation "ahoy", suitable to a voyage (or pilgriffage?).
Likewise, worled and gurled suggest "world" and "girl" but have
the -ed form of a past-tense verb. Somforbe resists interpretation
-- possibly a noun; possibly a slurred verb phrase.

However not all nonsense verse relies on word play. Some conjures up
nonsensical situations, for instance
Edward Lear's
poem, The Dong with a Luminous Nose has a perfectly comprehensible
chorus.

Far and few, far and few,

Are the lands where the Jumblies live;

Their heads are green, and their hands are blue

And they went to sea in a sieve.

What is the significance of the colour of their heads and hands? Well,
none really. It's just mellifluous nonsense.

Upon its noses stridethAlong the Noseybum,With it its kid abideth.It's not yet found in
Chambers.It's not yet found in
Webster's.Nor in the
OED.It trotted from my lyre,As first it came to be.Upon its noses strideth(As said before) since then,With it its kid abideth,Along the Noseybum.

Gernhardt's observation that

Die schärfsten Kritiker der Elche

waren früher selber welche

has become practically a proverb in German. While strictly speaking nonsense
(Elk have no critics), it
nonetheless expresses the truth that often the most strident opponents of an
ideology are its former adherents.